Tyler replied, “Some cop came to see me this morning.” He ran one finger down the long blade. “You know anything about that? You know what's up his butt?”
“No, Rob, I don't,” replied Toni.
“You been talkin’ with the cops at all? Sayin’ anything about me?”
“No,” lied Toni.
“Good. That's good.” He shrugged, turned to the woodwork by the door, and pressed in the knife. “I told them what I told them before: Liz didn't mean shit to me. Nothing. We busted up because she was a drag and a half.”
The asshole was starting to carve something in the woodwork of my building. My God, he was carving a letter. Starting on his initials.
“Tyler, quit fucking with my building.”
He laughed, blew the sawdust away from his handiwork, grinned, and said, “Then quit fucking with me… unless, of course, you two want to end up like Liz.” He wiped the blade of his knife on his leather coat, admired his work one last time, and said, “Guess I'll finish up later. ‘Bye.”
He plunged his knife into a sheath that hung from a chain around his waist, then swung open the outer door. As carefree as a diabolical Peter Pan, he bounded out and down the steps.
As the door hissed shut, I swore. “Oh, Jesus!”
Before I could say anything more, do anything else, Toni was lunging for the door, swinging it back open, going after him.
“Toni!” I hollered.
But I couldn't stop her, and in a second she was outside at the top of the steps and calling to him.
“Hey, Rob! Rob!”
Tyler stopped on the street, turned and looked at her, and snapped, “What?”
“Was my sister dating anyone else?”
“When we were together?” He laughed like it was a bad joke. “No way!”
“What about later, an older guy?”
“Like I told you, I know zip!”
With that, he was off, darting down the street. Toni stood there, frozen on the steps. I went out, took her gently by the arm.
“Come on.”
“That guy's such an asshole,” she muttered.
“Absolutely. You all right?”
“Yeah.” As we went in, I saw the damaged woodwork and shook my head. “Can you believe it?”
We ascended to my apartment in silence, both of us trying to comprehend what had just happened, what it'd all been about. Toni went into the living room, dropped onto the couch, and I disappeared into the kitchen, where I busied myself with frenetic thoughts as I made fresh coffee. When I came out a few minutes later with the pot and two mugs, Toni was sitting cross-legged on the couch, the phone squirreled in her lap.
“Yeah,” she was saying into the receiver, “and after that the jerk just darts out the door.”
Toni eyed me, mouthed the name, “Jenkins,” and finished up the story of our skinhead visitor. She listened to his response, was obviously not pleased.
Then said, “There's another thing. My friend Alex and I were just over at Liz's apartment. We talked with one of the neighbors, Chris something—I don't know her last name—and she said Liz had talked about a second boyfriend, an older guy. Chris said she'd even seen him once, though it was from a distance. She told you about this, didn't she?”
He said something, after which she methodically went through it all, all the stuff about the second boyfriend, the night Chris had seen him, the approximate time. A relatively short conversation. Very few questions from his end. Lastly, she told him she'd checked out of the hotel, gave him my number, and then hung up, dropping the receiver loudly in its cradle.
Toni shrugged, reached for her coffee. “Jenkins said he talked with Tyler this morning but he had an alibi for yesterday—ol’ Morticia-face, his girlfriend, said they were home together, all snuggly, cuddly in bed. I told him Tyler had just threatened us, and Jenkins wants us to be real careful. He said he's doing what he can, that he's working on it.”
I asked, “What did he say about Liz's other boyfriend?”
“He apologized, says he forgot to tell me, said earlier he didn't think it was important. Obviously that's not the case.”
“What else?”
“They're real busy, he promised we'd talk soon.” She took a sip from her mug. “They think that blond girl we saw in the warehouse might still be alive, so they're doing everything they can to find her. That's their top priority right now.” Toni shook her head, glanced out toward the sunporch. “I guess Liz's case is going to have to wait a bit.” She took a deep breath, blew it out. “Dammit.”
What were we to do next? Sit around and wait? But for what? Probably nothing. We had to proceed, couldn't let this drop, which probably meant it was up to us to get an ID on the second boyfriend, the older guy. Perhaps he'd be willing to talk to us, either confirming that Liz had jumped into the Mississippi of her own volition or maybe even incriminating himself.
Searching the pages of her calendar, Toni said, “I've got to call Dr. Dawson and give him the number here, too.”
“Good idea,” I agreed, thinking also that Liz had probably been more open with her shrink than anyone else. “He didn't mention anything about the second boyfriend, did he?”
“No,” said Toni, dialing. And then, “Hi, is Dr. Dawson in?”
It turned out that Dawson was in session and his phone had been picked up by his answering service. Toni left a message, saying she had a couple of questions for the doctor and asking him to call back at my number.
Toni hung up, and I sat there, thinking, pondering. What we needed was a photograph of the two older men in that cult. If Chris was able to identify one of them as the second boyfriend, then that would hurl us in a whole new direction. But a photograph—how were we going to get it? Ask Rob Tyler for a group photo? No way.
“Toni, how far do you think Jenkins is going to push this?” I asked, staring at the ceiling.
“Good question. He's obviously swamped right now. But later, I don't know. Why?”
“Don't you think it would stir up police interest if we talked with the guy Liz was with the night before she died?”
“What are you saying?”
“Well, someone should find him.”
“Of course.”
“And I kind of doubt that Jenkins is going to pull through on this. At least not anytime soon.”
“So?”
“So… so maybe we're going to have to find him on our own.”
She shook her head, rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
“There's got to be a way, Toni.”
I slumped back in the armchair, sipped some coffee. Stared up at the ceiling. Chances were that this guy was one of the cult members. He might not be, but that had to be our first angle.
“We have to get ourselves to another cult meeting,” I mumbled. “The guy Chris saw Liz with might be one of those older Dragons.”
“Alex, you saw Tyler. You heard him. What are we going to do? Pop in at their little get-together, introduce ourselves, ask them a few questions, mainly which one of them killed my sister?”
“No, you're going to bring your camera—you have it with you, don't you?” I asked, recalling she'd never been without it before.
“Yeah.”
“Telephoto?”
“Sure.”
“Well, there we go. We'll only get close enough for you to use the telephoto, you snap a picture of those two older guys, then we see if Chris can identify one of them.”
Toni stretched out on the couch. “Okay, so I might be able to get a couple of pictures, but don't you think the cops would be around, too? Don't you think they'll have them under surveillance?”
“Maybe, but they weren't yesterday. Besides, we can just disappear if we sense that Jenkins or whoever is around.”
“Yeah, but how are we going to actually get to another one of these meetings? You can be sure as hell the Dragons aren't going to post their hours anywhere and that they're not going to use that warehouse again.”
“We'll j
ust have to follow Tyler again.”
She gazed at me like I was nuts. “You're telling me we're just going to sit outside his house and tail him everywhere until he leads us back to the cult? Great idea, Alex. That might not be for another week or another month or…or God knows how long.”
“I'm working on that.”
I closed my eyes. Cults usually had to do with the devil or paganism, worship of some kind that went beyond the everyday encounters of my life. I thought of Celts and Druids, witches and warlocks. Sacrifices, too.
That's right. There'd been the woman they were about to do God knew what to, and there had been a goat in the warehouse, too. A sacrificial goat, split wide and filled with ceremonial food. A sacrifice to what, a mythical dragon? Some fire-breathing creature from the other world? Perhaps. But why would they have been doing it that night? What was their schedule, their calendar?
“Toni, if a cult had a calendar of some sort, what do you suppose it would be?”
“Um, I imagine they'd be on some sort of cycle. A solar one, maybe. Then again, I think they'd be on a dark cycle, something occultish, I suppose, so I guess they'd be on a lunar cycle.”
My eyes opened wide. The other night after we'd been chased out of the warehouse. After we'd called the cops. When we were sitting in the cop car. Yes. That was it. When the cops were going through the warehouse and we were sitting there waiting; I had leaned back. Stared up and out the rear window. And what had I seen? A big white orb rising in the sky. A big, solid circle of pale light rising in the dark blue sky.
“Toni, maybe you're right. Maybe they're on a lunar calendar, and they were meeting specifically that night because it was a full moon. Maybe it's all part of some spring ritual.”
She stared at me, latched on to my logic, and said, “Of course.” Pause, then, “But if the moon was full, it'd be waning now.”
My balloon of excitement immediately began to deflate. She could be right, and if so there wouldn't be another full moon for another twenty-seven days.
“Where's the newspaper?” I said.
I jumped to my feet, glanced about the living room, saw no sign of the Tribune. I hurried down the hall, past the bedrooms, through the dining room, and into the kitchen. There it was, lying next to the coffee maker. Snatching it up, I scanned it, quickly flipped to the only part I regularly saw mention of the moon.
Walking as I read, I returned to the living room, said, “Maybe there's something here in the horoscopes. Some shifting of planets.”
“Good idea,” said Toni.
However, there was nothing of the sort mentioned in today's predictions. Only advice, sometimes sage, often banal. No reference to any kind of lunar activity that might spur a cult into action.
“Damm it,” I moaned. “Nothing at all.”
Toni wasn't so easily defeated. “What about the weather? Sometimes they list solar and lunar activities, don't they?”
Almost madly, I threw the paper down on the coffee table, sat down on the couch next to Toni, and flipped through the pages. In a state where the temperature fluctuated some 130 degrees or more from summer to winter, in a region of unending soybeans and corn, Min-nesotans were obsessed about weather and anything that might affect it. It took up almost a whole back page of one of the sections. Big color weather map, the whole bit. Even a weather column, which I had never read because war and famine, politics and crime were what absorbed me over my cereal. Besides, what kind of paper, I had always wondered, had a weather column full of nerdy drivel about highs and lows and pressure systems, and what kind of people read about weather rather than experienced it? I understood that talking weather up here was a compulsive pastime, but…
I spread the paper flat, Toni and I leaned forward, and we both searched the temperatures, the forecasts, the average lows and highs. If there were anything, it would be here on this page.
Toni's finger went right to one box. “Look.”
It was a section simply marked “Sun and Moon,” offering how many hours of daylight there were would be, time of sunrise, sunset, as well as a diagram of today's moon. My heart jumped. The moon had not been full last night but it would be tomorrow.
“Look.” Toni had leaped ahead, gone beyond the Sun and Moon box. “Read this.”
With a long, thin finger, she was pointing to the weather column. Chatty. Very much so. Nice system coming in. Clear skies. Pleasant spring temperatures. Beautiful skies. Beautiful nights. All will maintain. Perfect for tomorrow evening's lunar eclipse.
“That's it. Absolutely,” I said, glancing up, reaching out, touching Toni on the knee. “What kind of cult would miss not only a full moon but an eclipse on a beautiful spring night?”
Toni bit her bottom lip, ran a hand through her hair. “Alex, do we want to do this? Tyler's obviously not a very stable sort. This could be really stupid, not to mention dangerous.”
“I know, but… but…” I kept seeing Tyler's knife, the light glinting off the blade. “I don't want the dregs of the world to dictate my life.”
“Oh, cut it out, this isn't the time for any kind of cowboy-macho shit.”
I nodded. “You're right, I know, but if Jenkins is off chasing around on some other case, how else are you going to find out what really happened to Liz?”
A question to which Toni had no response.
Chapter 16
That afternoon and evening, Toni and I talked about it over and over again, coming at it from all different angles, trying to find a different, less dangerous way, but always ending up with the same conclusion. There just didn't seem to be any other course of action, at least not in the immediate future. If Jenkins was busy trying to find that abducted young woman, who else was going to follow up on the issue of Liz's second boyfriend? And how else were we going to follow up on it except to snap some photos of a few of the Dragons, photos that we could then show Chris?
The only wild card, of course, was the police. We had no way of knowing or finding out what they were doing. Jenkins certainly wasn't going to tell us. It was fairly clear that they wouldn't be tracking the Dragons for Liz's sake, but they might be doing so in an attempt to locate the blond woman before she was killed. In that case, if the police were around, Toni and I would back off, be sure to keep out of the way. But if they weren't there, well, then… then we certainly would have chosen the right course.
All of that, for sure, was presuming that we were correct, that the Dragons would hold a meeting the following evening, the night of the lunar eclipse. We didn't know where their meeting would be, though, and Toni and I quickly realized that meant we would have to follow Rob Tyler once again. We also surmised that we would have to be smarter about it, too. In the little vestibule of my building, Tyler had said nothing about our following him the other day, so apparently he was unaware it was he who had led us to the Dragons. Regardless, he'd certainly be taking stricter precautions. Employing a trick I'd read about in a spy novel, however, I figured we had a reasonable chance of avoiding his detection.
Which was how we were going to handle it, the double method, the two of us working semi-independently. A rotating car tail was very difficult to detect, and between my Honda and Toni's small rental car, we felt confident, even certain, that we'd be able to follow Tyler successfully. This was America, after all, and this was Minneapolis, the city that had wiped out its six-hundred-mile streetcar system for ribbons of freeway, so we were fairly sure all this would transpire via auto. The following morning around ten, Toni went out and bought a set of walkie-talkies.
“Oh, very nice,” I said as I started to fix lunch at my place. “A his and hers.”
She was fitting her walkie-talkie into her camera bag, and sniped, “Just you wait.”
While I made us each a turkey sandwich, Toni disappeared into the living room. I peered through my dining room and down the long hall, and discerned that she was on the phone. I figured she was checking in with her office, perhaps advising on a few patients, but when she returned a few minu
tes later she was clearly distressed.
“I just called The North Center and spoke with Laura's counselor.” She groaned as she dropped onto one of the kitchen stools. “Laura's not sure she wants to see me. Can you believe it? I left my number and asked her to at least call me.” Toni eyed the sandwich. “Give me lots of mayo. Got any chips?”
“What, are you going for calories or carbohydrates?”
“Both. The more the better. How about cookies? Any around?”
We had a leisurely if rather quiet meal, Toni lost in thought most of the time. I tried to talk a bit about Laura, but Toni quickly changed the subject.
By three o'clock we were in our respective cars. When we didn't find Rob Tyler at home, we went directly to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, which was our second and perhaps only other chance at finding Tyler. The lunar eclipse wasn't until well after sunset, so he still had to be around, and Toni followed me to the sprawling arts complex, which included the museum, the Children's Theater, and, of course, MCAD. The surrounding streets were lined with cars, and I drove the north and south avenues, Toni the east and west streets, as we searched for an old blue Duster.
I saw nothing like it, though. Lots of other studenty cars, trashed-out old ones riddled with rust holes. Some Cadillacs, fancy foreign cars, too, which certainly belonged to patrons of the Institute of Arts. But no near-moldy Duster.
Nothing until Toni came over the walkie-talkie, simply saying, “Found it.”
I braked, pulled to the side of First Avenue South, and into my transmitter said, “Great, where are you?”
“By the dorms. There's a student parking lot back here.”
I pulled around, found Toni parked in a corner. I squeezed my car next to hers, and we spoke through rolled-down car windows.
“Up front there,” said Toni. “See?”
I saw it, nodded. It was a car you couldn't miss. A Duster well into its teens if not beyond. Toni volunteered to scope the campus, see if she could spot him. She stuffed her walkie-talkie back into her camera bag, climbed out of her car, and started for a gathering of whitish buildings clumped in the shadows of the Institute of Arts.
Death Trance Page 14
